With my Windows Vista laptop obselete and too under powered for the latest software qwhere it runs at a snail's pace, I am looking at an HP Omen gaming laptop that can be custom built by HP with additional features.

I was thinking about going with a Dell laptop. I can't find any models with built-in SD Card readers. To me that's a drawback. Even though I like the fact that Dell still makes laptops with built-in optical drives, which is another plus, I find it more necessary to have a built-in SD Card reader for a portable editing computer.

Don't worry too much about a built in SD card reader. Get a good quality external if you need. The same with optical drives.

For an editing machine, the most important parts is CPU, Memory, HDD, Video Card in that order. SD reader doesn't even register on the scale of importance. It's a tiny level of convenience at best.

Which is why I am looking at "gaming computers" over business computers. Game computers have better video cards, processors, memory, and bigger hard drives than business computers.

My Sony Viao VGN-AR830E is a tough act to follow having all the above plus the built-in SD Card slot and internal Blu-ray drive. But, five years later it is outdated with faster computers with more memory and bigger hard drives.

I am also looking at the fact it has three built-in USB 3 ports for high speed external devices.

I have many 3.5 SATA3 (I really don't know why they bother with SATA3 for mechanical) mechanical drives. Some drives have a sustained throughput at about 40MB/s where others sit at 120-130MB/s. Failing to do your research may mean getting a slow drive.

You'd have to check but aren't most 2.5 drives 5000 rpm? Generally speaking, they don't get the performance that a 7200 rpm drive will get.

If you have the operating system, software and the media on the same drive, it may be prudent to ensure it will handle it.

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Some are solid state. But, they are too small for video editing.

Weren't you looking at a 2tb drive before? I was looking at a 4tb SSD today, more than enough for most editing uses. If that's too small, insanity may make you take a look at Data Center grade SSD's. They're as dear as poison but Seagate released a 60tb SSD version last year... or look for a solution somewhere in the middle.

It's why I say, determine what specs you need to do what you want to do, then make your decision of what hardware to purchase. Buying right the first time will save you money. 40MB/s may be enough, then again, you may find yourself in that unlikely circumstance where you need more than the 500MB/s SSD's push out. The only way you can do that is first determine what you're going to do, then work out what you need to accomplish that.

Odds on, you're only going to need a run of the mill machine, though, you haven't described much about your requirements, so all we can do is point you in the wrong direction.

In my area the largest solid state drives are 512 Gigs and the largest SATA and external USB 3 hard drives are 6TB.

Hands down, USB 3 is faster than SATA. For future editing in 4K, a 4TB or 6TB would be better, as well as for storage of royalty free media for productions such as greenscreen backgrounds, special effects libraries, sound effects, and so on.

USB 3 connection is fast, but it is only as fast as the disks are.
Just lik any connection.
There are no disks that can keep up with USB3 or SATA, so the bottleneck are always the disks write and read speed.